Good communication between doctor and patient has always been an important part of healthcare. While face-to-face communication has always been the best form of communication, it is also often necessary for physicians to remain available after hours for emergencies and other patient concerns.
The traditional method of contacting a physician after hours has been through an answering service. Answering services answer calls directed to the physician and take messages. The physician may periodically call the answering service to pick up his messages. Alternatively, the answering service may page the physician for each message, if the physician has a pager.
While answering services work well for taking and retrieving messages, some calls could be handled without the physician's involvement. However, only the physician is qualified to make a decision regarding the handling of his patients by others.
Because of the variability of patient handling procedures among medical specialties, conventional systems are often not structured to incorporate the needs of the individual physician and his practice. Accordingly, a need exists for a method of processing patient calls that can be structured to meet a variety of patient needs.